Some news from Iraq

31 May 2021

While the world has been slowed down by the pandemic, archaeologists, many of whom were unable to do fieldwork in 2020, are taking stock of their previous work and planning future work in Iraq. On site, the reconstruction work continues, sometimes with a bitter assessment of the state of certain sites.

The Mosul Museum, founded in 1952, has suffered greatly from the occupation of the region by Daesh. In 2015, jihadists destroyed numerous original and copy statues from the sites of Nineveh and Hatra. After  the Iraqi army recaptured the region in 2017, Iraqi and international researchers were able to start work on the restoration of the museum, which has been underway for the past two years. They found a great deal of damage: explosive charges destroyed a giant statue of a winged androcephalous bull from ancient Kalhu. The building, damaged by mortar fire, is gradually being restored. Each object is inventoried, described and restored. The researchers are moreover considering building a new museographic path. This is a long-term project, which will lead to the reopening of the museum to the public in a few years.

Mosul is also included in the project Documenting Disappearing History: The Mapping Mesopotamian Monument Project (MMM). This project, which began in 2012, has focused on Iraqi Kurdistan and eastern Anatolia to identify endangered monuments, rock reliefs and architectural works. Coordinated by Zainab Bahrani (Columbia University), it has brought together an international team which, in some cases, was able to document sites, using modern scanning techniques, shortly before they were damaged. Among the reliefs inventoried are, for example, the one from Darand-i Gawr in the Suleymaniyeh district, carved under the orders of a ruler of the Third Dynasty of Ur (21st century BC), and Assyrian reliefs from the first millennium. The team also monitored and surveyed the aqueduct of King Sennacherib at Jerwan, which can now be associated with the water control system imposed by this ruler north of Nineveh. The database resulting from this inventory will soon be opened to the public, and the MMM project will continue its work in southern Iraq in the years to come

It is precisely in the south of the country that many archaeological missions have started working again in the last ten years. Among them, a Slovak-Iraqi mission opened a site in 2016 at Tell Jokha, the ancient Sumerian city of Umma, south of Baghdad. The site has never been officially excavated before, but it has been well known to looters for over a century. In total, nearly 30,000 cuneiform tablets from Umma dating from the late 3rd and early 2nd millennia have been sold on the antiquities market. A trench opened in the upper part of the tell in 2017 uncovered constructions and 18 tablets, the oldest dated to the Archaic Dynastic IIIb period (2550-2350). The discoveries are expected to provide a map of the city of Umma, which covered 400 ha, and to clarify the history of the Sumerian dynasties in the 3rd millennium.

The site of ancient Umma is located on the edge of the delta marshes in southern Iraq. These marshes, after having been drained by Saddam Hussein in the 1990s, were restored to some extent in 2003 and regained some of their biodiversity. Thanks to the efforts of their inhabitants, they were added to the Unesco World Heritage List in 2016, along with the archaeological sites of Uruk, Ur and Eridu. Unfortunately, these marshes with their flora and fauna are now threatened by wastewater loaded with heavy metals from industrial sites. More than two-thirds of the waste from factories is dumped into Iraq's rivers and seas because the state does not have the means to build the necessary infrastructure.

At the end of 2020, the Iraqi government, with the support of the United Nations Environment Programme's National Adaptation Plan, launched a national plan to try to reduce the country's vulnerability to the negative effects of climate change. With financial support from the Green Climate Fund, Iraq should strengthen its institutional and technical capacities to adapt in the long term in national development planning and thus find solutions to waste treatment, among other things. Let us hope that the unique biodiversity of the southern marshes can once again be saved.